This post is a very rough sketch of ideas and may include unfinished, incomplete, or erroneous ideas that will later be corrected. This post will be part of a series that will form the basis of a new book I’m writing following on the themes of my last book, Thoughts From Reconstruction. All of these themes center around the New Covenant. You can find everything published so far in this series on the Highlights page under the My Most Important section.
Prologue
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. -2 Timothy 4:3
I see a time coming when most, even Christians, will lose confidence in our ability to make sense of Christian morality in the ways that we have done so up until now. I think that time may have already come.
We have become used to a culture that finds Christian values incredulous and imposing. We have even come so far in worldly values that the world, itself, has begun to see the limits of its own worldly morality, and has began to desire a return to something like Christian values.
Yet, we find ourselves in an awkward place where we are uncertain how, exactly, we are to go about getting back. We find ourselves embarrassed by some of the ways we have tried to defend Christian values.
We find ourselves in a position where we want to defend Christianity, again, but we have lost confidence in in our ability to justify it. This, I see, is the challenge for the next era of Christianity. It is a challenge to which I believe I can offer a vision for a path forward.
Zooming Out
We can trace our problems back as far as we like but for our purposes we’ll start with the waning of faith post-World War 2 when we tried to settle back into Christian culture but realized a mass media world was upon us and we met with the ’60s culture of wild abandon.
In answer, we tried to ensure Christian values by enforcing them by the “moral majority.” But the youth were already lost in mass media culture. Christians looked inward and tried to save themselves with apologetics ministries but this never reached critical adoption and it faced competition from the opposite angle with Christians practicing ‘seeker sensitive’ methods to attract new adherents.
Christianity showed some promise, especially during a brief respite in the shock of 9/11, but then faced a new challenge, which it seemed unable to meet, in the New Atheism movement. And it was the New Atheism movement that, most clearly, began the Christian ‘deconstruction’ era which was characterized by a loss of confidence in the faith.
Christians lost confidence in the historicity of the Bible, lost confidence in the Authority of what the Bible had to say, and, most damaging of all, began to adopt post-modern doubts about even the possibility of real and absolute truth. We are at a critical low point of confidence in the assertion of anything in absolute terms. There is reason for hope, however, as I believe it is now evident we have swung so far in one direction that we are now seeing the limits of our current trajectory and now we are open to the possibilities of letting the pendulum swing back.
The Problem
The teachings of Christ were for all people, high and low, and never required theologians, monks, or priests to teach the Gospel message that we are sinful before God, need a saviour, and that God sent His Son as Saviour so that none should perish but have eternal life.
We find ourselves, however, living in the catastrophe of the complexity of the ‘everythingness of everything’ and we are doubling down on complexity when complexity is the very thing resulting in the problems of our particular moment.
At every turn, and in every way, that we try to grow our faith, grow our church followers, and grow our Christian culture, we are met with a multitude of challenges, and we nobly attempt to answer to each one. Noble so, it may be, but there is a trap hiding there.
“It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” -G.K. Chesterton
There are an infinite number of ways to falsify a truth claim. The assertion that Christianity makes is like the one angle ‘at which one stands’ and the infinite challenges are the ‘infinity of angles at which one falls’.
In trying to completely and decisively answer every challenge, each answer is opened up to an infinite number of challenges. Every assertion has one or more challenges, every challenge has one or more responses, and every response has one or more challenges… And so it goes on and we see that it is self-defeating and, worst of all, demoralizing, leading to weakness and accepting things less than our ideals.
This regressive process is a manifestation of a reality of being, of a destabilizing force, a universal pattern to which all being coheres or violates. It is fractal and recursive in nature. And, in this case, it is an anti-pattern leading leading to the destruction of the possibility of fulfilling the pattern of seeking the ideal.
What we need is not only the technicality of an “answer” but a response that is simple enough for a child’s microcosm yet deep enough for an adult’s macrocosm, indeed, his entire cosmology.
Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! -1 Corinthians 6:3
The Solution
Such a resolution is found in the New Covenant which simplifies the chaos of complexity to two guiding rules: Love God and love your neighbour. Yet we, Christians, at least, all know this and still find it incredibly complex to think through issues in a satisfactory way with confidence. It is the New Covenant we need to understand and the Bible is there to help us understand it.
The Bible tells us how the New Covenant is to be lived out and provides us with a additional keys to help us tackle morality, meaning, and the uncertainty that comes with making absolute claims. Christ gave us the Great Commandment, Love God and Neighbour (Matthew 22:37-38), the Great Commission, Preach the Gospel and Make Disciples (Matthew 28:18-20), and, via the Apostle James, the Great Mercy, Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment (James 2:12-13).
Love God and Neighbour
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-38
Preach the Gospel and Make Disciples
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20
Mercy Triumphs Over Judgement
Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 2:12-13
Zooming In
The New Covenant can be thought of, in one sense, like zooming and telephoto camera with its sequence of nested optical lenses in a camera. When zoomed out, it is as if you were only looking through one lens. When zoomed in, additional magnification lens are added and the image becomes clearer, more precise. You only need a few lenses to attain a high degree of magnification because of their multiplication effect. And this is just how I hope to present the New Covenant.
First, we are commanded to Love God. Then, if there is a case about our neighbour, which it usually is, we add the lens of Love Neighbour. If there is a case about career, we might instead add the lens of Preach the Gospel. For a more complex case about careers and living the faith, we might end up with the lens of Love God, Love Neighbour, and Make Disciples. And if our choices are good yet uncertain, we can add the lens of Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment, knowing that Christ’s mercy covers us even if we are wrong, which, as mere humans, we are bound to be. This is how the New Covenant maintains simplicity while being able to handle complexity: The very thing we long for in our moral choices.
The Bible, friends, preachers, teachers, conscience, and more, become like focal adjustments, as aperture, shutter speed, and light levels are to photography. These sources ‘adjust’ how we perceive what the lenses are showing us, what they actually mean, and how they are actually to be lived out.
The Greatest Law
My hope is to expose, again, the foundations that hold up the superstructure of our current moral order.
We have built so much upon what Christ taught us. This has an aspect of good to it. Progress tends to create and creating involves greater complexity. But building on the New Covenant also comes with the risk of forgetting the foundations. We run the risk of assuming the superstructure of our moral law is the moral law. We then run the risk of reaching a point where we can no longer work our way back to the foundations and, when that happens, we tend towards tearing down the substructure because we think it’s part of the problem. In short, we start deconstructing.
We’re going to take a look at the New Covenant again, how Jesus revealed the True Law within the Law we know, how Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets, how the New Covenant agrees with the Old Covenant, how it aligns with the reality of being, and how it all coheres and finds it source in God.
We’re also going to discover how much scaffolding has been placed around the superstructure of our moral order. We are going to discover, in some cases uncomfortably, how much of our moral order is extra-Biblical, and how we run the risk of being like the Pharisees by adding what isn’t technically Biblical to the moral law.
This will take us to uncomfortable places. Jesus took the people of His day to uncomfortable places. Things we packed neatly in boxes of ‘permissible behaviour’ will be reopened and reconsidered. Old ‘un-Christian’ practices will rise again.
If we fail to attempt this undertaking, we risk the collapse of the whole moral order. It is better, then, to experience the ‘small death’ you recover from then the ‘big death’ that swallows you. When deconstruction runs its course, people will not seek amoral chaos, they will instead impose a tyrannical human morality, which history demonstrates leads to great evil, much suffering, and a massive scale of death.
I am striving to help lay the groundwork now for the return to, at least, a recognition of Christ’s New Covenant moral order from which we can rightly understand each and every case we may face. How will we judge angels if we can’t rightly apply God’s Word here and now?
Jesus gave us the Greatest Commandment, to love God and Neighbour, the Greatest Commission, to preach the Gospel and make disciples, and by the Holy Spirit, He gave us the Greatest Mercy, mercy triumphs over judgment, and these together, I suggest, can be thought of as the Greatest Law.
The Greatest Law in Jesus reminds us that we have glibly glossed over centuries of layer upon layer of extra moral rules. But, now, we have the perspective and resources to approach each new and unique moral circumstance through a lens capable of showing us how Christianity has the best position, solution, and outcomes for every moral challenge.
The chaos of the complexity of the ‘everythingness of everything’ in our day is already overwhelming us and we are not able to meet it. Only in returning to Christ’s actual teachings do we have a hope of most truly loving God, loving our neighbour, preaching the Gospel, making disciples, and showing the triumph of mercy over judgment epitomized in Jesus, Saviour for each and every one of us.
This series will continue. Please check back from time to time, if you’re interested in reading new parts as they become available. The entire series will be made available on the Highlights page under the My Most Important section as each part is published.
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